Banned for Gardening?

[kanican]

My Condolences

I normally would not make a post in reaction to FFXI news, but I felt that this was a good exception.

Banned for Gardening?
(Thread 1)
(Thread 2)
(Thread 3)
(Thread 4)

Recently, there was another wave of RMT bannings that focused on characters using a gardening NPC method of making gil.  In SE's attempt to ban RMT using this method (note:

Comments

Re: Bans

[kanican]

I think we should all be allowed to make mistakes, including SE, but the real issue is when SE makes one, you typically have no recourse. From what I've read, the customer service is extremely hard to deal with and rarely ends up in you even getting to explain yourself to someone with knowledge of the game. If you were banned on accident and could remedy it with a phone call saying "ok guys just take 10 seconds and look at my account, I clearly am not a chinese gil farmer", this wouldn't be an issue. Like you said, there are any number of ways to quickly determine if someone is likely a legit player. How many RMTs still have Limbus access?

The thing is SE doesn't tell you what's going on. And even if it's beyond clear that they screwed up, they still won't tell you if they are even attempting to remedy the situation or not. This goes for game flaws as well as random bans. I remember with the enfeebling magic nerf (mistake) last patch, it took a very QQ post from a Alla writer to get 1 tiny response thread by someone from SE. Everything's done without player knowledge.

Perhaps the worst sign is just the overall impression of SE from its vocal player base. I still believe that the average FFXI player doesn't honestly care about some mistaken banning or follow FFXI community sites, but when nearly the entire vocal player base, including the formerly very pro-SE Allakhazam, collectively just assumes SE doesn't care, it's a bad sign.

As far as how I'm doing, very well! I don't play quite as much but I did reach 75. I've started hanging out on Odin a bit more ever since news of 14 hit though (not as much motivation to start anew when you know it'll end soon). Being banned still kind of sucks (obviously), but the silver lining is a lot of the grind-it-out aspects of the game like gear I just don't care about anymore. It's quite liberating. I'd obviously still want my account back, but it's always good to try to find a silver lining.